Resources

Our Partners

The American Press Institute conducts research, training, convenes thought leaders and creates tools to help chart a path ahead for journalism in the 21st century.

The Center for Public Integrity was founded in 1989 by Charles Lewis. It is one of the country’s oldest and largest nonpartisan, nonprofit investigative news organizations. The group’s mission is to serve democracy by revealing abuses of power, corruption and betrayal of public trust by powerful public and private institutions, using the tools of investigative journalism. The Center is a nonprofit digital news organization; it is nonpartisan and does no advocacy work. The Center for Public Integrity is a 501(c)(3) tax exempt organization.

The Center for Responsive Politics is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization whose mission is to inform citizens about how money and politics affects their lives; empower voters and activists by providing unbiased information; and advocate for a transparent and responsive government. CRP is a fellow recipient, along with the Internet Archive, of funding from the Knight News Challenge on Elections, which is enabling it to vastly expand the amount of information available to voters on politically active nonprofit organizations that don’t disclose their donors’ identities.

The Duke Reporters’ Lab will analyze the ads and help fact-checkers identify individual claims that can be checked. Each day, Duke students will review the new ads and compile a database of statements. The database will be made available to fact-checkers at news organizations.

Factcheck.org, is a nonpartisan, nonprofit “consumer advocate” for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. The organization monitors the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews and news releases. The goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

Politifact, winner of the Pulitzer prize, is a fact-checking website that rates the accuracy of claims by elected officials and others who speak up in American politics. Politifact is run by editors and reporters from the Tampa Bay Times, an independent newspaper in Florida, as is PunditFact, a site devoted to fact-checking pundits. The PolitiFact state sites are run by news organizations that have partnered with the Times. The state sites and PunditFact follow the same principles as the national site.

The Washington Post’s Fact Checker, directed by award-winning journalist Glenn Kessler, specializes in digging up the facts (or lack thereof) behind the conventional wisdom. The Fact Checker project is not “bound by the antics of the presidential campaign season, but will focus on any statements by political figures and government officials–in the United States and abroad–that cry out for fact-checking.”

Resources

Political Ad Sleuth is a project dedicated to collecting and posting the information available in the “public files” of U.S. broadcast stations on the Internet. This “public file” includes important information detailing political advertisements sold at the station (known as the “political file”).

Despite these files being “public,” historically, they haven’t been easy to reach -- rendering them inaccessible to all but the most tenacious members of the public. Since 2014, the Federal Communications Commission has required all broadcast television stations to make their files available online. The agency is currently considering rules that would expand disclosure requirements to cable, radio and satellite companies.

Use Political Ad Sleuth to get the latest information on political ads purchased at television stations around the country. These files provide the only information we have on who's behind some of the shadowy groups pouring money into the election. You can sort it by state and individual television market or search by date. This information is not complete but it is the most comprehensive data available.

Social media sites for campaigns and outside groups active in the 2016 elections are collected by the Political TV Ad Archive using Archive-It, the Internet Archive's service to help organizations, collect, catalog, and manage their collections of archived content with 24/7 access and full text search available for their use.

The Wesleyan Media Project was established in 2010 to track advertising in federal elections, and it is a successor to the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which tracked political advertising between 1998 and 2008. Our real-time tracking is made possible this year through the generous support of The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and Wesleyan University.

I Agree To See connects people interested in viewing campaign advertisements and reading more about campaigns with the advertisements released by candidates and organizations. Ultimately, I Agree to See is a marketplace for political communication to make campaign advertising dramatically more efficient and less costly.

Developed by Kalev Leetaru, this resource records how many times each US presidential candidate's name was mentioned on each of the major television networks monitored by the Internet Archive. These are based on scanning the closed captioning records of each broadcast. Searches may be filtered by candidate, network, and other factors.

Learn More About the Political TV Ad Archive

About the Archive

The Political TV Ad Archive collected and, using innovative open source technology, tracked airings of political ads in key markets the 2016 election cycle.

The collection also linked ads to fact-checks by national fact-checking organizations. In addition to tracking airings across key primary states, the collection includes ads that may air elsewhere or exclusively on social media.

Recent Blog Posts

by Katie Donnelly Over the past extremely unpredictable election year, the Internet Archive invented new methods and tools to give journalists, researchers, and the public the power to access, scrutinize, share, and thoroughly fact-check political ads, presidential debates, and TV news broadcasts. Our efforts were designed to help citizens better understand the patterns of political messages designed to persuade them […]

Guest post by Kalev Leetaru Today the Internet Archive announces a new interactive timeline visualization–the Television Explorer–that lets you trace how any keyword–think “emails”, “tax returns”, “alt-right”–has been covered on U.S. television news over the past half-decade. See the Television Explorer, a new tool for exploring TV News. Over the past year and a half, the GDELT Project and the Internet […]